The statements made over the past 4 days by board chairman Deborah Hersman, have unleashed a torrent of speculation and premature judgments.

On the other hand, as I reported in the blog of the Airline PassengerExperience Association, a number of thoughtful, safety-aware and circumspect
pilots have contacted me with their thoughts about this odd accident in which
Asiana crew was flying too slow and too low and plowed the tail of the Boeing 777 into the sea wall boundary at San Francisco International Airport. That’s reasonable commentary as is the now widely distributed PPRUNE essay on one man’s experience
training Korean pilots.

That so much information was available so quickly is
attributable to the fact that the crash was at a major airport and the data
recorders were recovered and reviewed before the event was a day old. Many survivors gave interviews to the press and
a chilling video of the accident also provided early information.

But the pilots’ union is mistaken if it believes any aspect
of the media coverage would be more responsible with less information shared by the safety board. The opposite is true.

The media not only abhors a vacuum, it will not tolerate
one. Talking
heads will talk.

Rather than complain over that which it does not control and even worse complain about an
established and successful aspect of the way Federal crash investigations are handled, ALPA would be better served by offering up commentary and context. It represents pilots from airlines that fly
the 777 on trans-Pacific flights into SFO and it staffs an entire safety and
engineering department at its headquarters in Herndon, Virginia.

ALPA of late, has made
many, many efforts to contemporize itself. Heck, it’s on twitter! so here in less than 140 characters is my
message: @WeAreALPA - Starving the beast does not silence the beast. You’re old
enough to know better & smart enough to make a positive contribution.